American Ebola victim Dr. Kent Brantly: 'I felt like I was about to die'

By Greg Botelho, CNN

Updated 0209 GMT (0909 HKT) September 3, 2014

Dr. Kent Brantly contracted Ebola while in West Africa, where he was helping those infected by the deadly virus.

Story highlights

Dr. Kent Brantly went to West Africa to work for a Christian relief organization

He recalls feeling "a little off" on July 23, then testing positive for Ebola virus

Brantly says he had "no reserve," didn't know if he could continue breathing

He did and -- after time at an Atlanta hospital -- was declared symptom-free

Dr. Kent Brantly had stared death in the face many times, doing all he could against frightful odds to save Ebola victims in West Africa.

Until death stared back.

In his first extensive on-camera interview since contracting the virus, Brantly recalled to NBC News on Tuesday how close he had come to being one more of the over 1,500 people the World Health Organization says have lost their lives to Ebola in the current outbreak.

Doctors never told him outright he might not survive as he lay in a bed in Liberia, an ocean away from his family. They didn't have to.

"I felt like I was about to die," Brantly told NBC's Matt Lauer. "And I said to the nurse taking care of me, 'I'm sick. I have no reserve, and I don't know how long I can keep this up.'"

He'd been well schooled on how to treat disease, from his days at Indiana University's medical school to his residency at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. If he'd contacted Ebola back in the United States, there would have been many more machines and assets available to help him get better.

Photos: The Ebola epidemic 47 photos

Photos: The Ebola epidemic47 photos

The Ebola epidemic – Red Cross workers, wearing protective suits, carry the body of a person who died from Ebola during a burial in Monrovia, Liberia, on Monday, January 5. Since the epidemic started a little more than a year ago in a remote village in Guinea, the world has seen more than 8,400 deaths, according to the latest numbers from the World Health Organization. And that number is believed to be low, since there was widespread under-reporting of cases, according to WHO.

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Pauline Cafferkey, a Scottish woman diagnosed with Ebola, is put on a plane in Glasgow, Scotland, on Tuesday, December 30. Cafferkey, a 39-year-old nurse who volunteered in Sierra Leone, was being transported to London for treatment.

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Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has her temperature taken before the opening of a new Ebola clinic Tuesday, November 25, in Monrovia.

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A child who survived the Ebola virus is fed by another survivor at a treatment center on the outskirts of Freetown, Sierra Leone, on Tuesday, November 11.

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Health workers in Monrovia cover the body of a man suspected of dying from the Ebola virus on Friday, October 31.

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Kaci Hickox leaves her home in Fort Kent, Maine, to take a bike ride with her boyfriend on Thursday, October 30. Hickox, a nurse, recently returned to the United States from West Africa, where she treated Ebola victims. State authorities wanted her to avoid public places for 21 days -- the virus' incubation period. But Hickox, who twice tested negative for Ebola, said she would defy efforts to keep her quarantined at home.

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Crew members at an airport in Accra, Ghana, unload supplies sent from China on Wednesday, October 29.

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Health officials in Nairobi, Kenya, prepare to screen passengers arriving at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on Tuesday, October 28.

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U.S. President Barack Obama hugs Ebola survivor Nina Pham in the Oval Office of the White House on Friday, October 24. Pham, one of two Dallas nurses diagnosed with the virus, was declared Ebola-free after being treated at a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. The other nurse, Amber Vinson (not pictured), was treated in Atlanta and also declared Ebola-free.

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Health workers in Port Loko, Sierra Leone, transport the body of a person who is suspected to have died of Ebola on Tuesday, October 21.

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Health workers bury a body on the outskirts of Monrovia on Monday, October 20.

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Garteh Korkoryah, center, is comforted during a memorial service for her son, Thomas Eric Duncan, on Saturday, October 18, in Salisbury, North Carolina. Duncan, a 42-year-old Liberian citizen, died October 8 in a Dallas hospital. He was in the country to visit his son and his son's mother, and he was the first person in the United States to be diagnosed with Ebola.

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Boys run from blowing dust as a U.S. military aircraft leaves the construction site of an Ebola treatment center in Tubmanburg, Liberia, on Wednesday, October 15.

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Aid workers from the Liberian Medical Renaissance League stage an Ebola awareness event October 15 in Monrovia. The group performs street dramas throughout Monrovia to educate the public on Ebola symptoms and how to handle people who are infected with the virus.

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Ebola survivors prepare to leave a Doctors Without Borders treatment center after recovering from the virus in Paynesville, Liberia, on October 12.

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A woman crawls toward the body of her sister as a burial team takes her away for cremation Friday, October 10, in Monrovia. The sister had died from Ebola earlier in the morning while trying to walk to a treatment center, according to her relatives.

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A person peeks out from the Dallas apartment where Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with the Ebola virus in the United States, was staying on Friday, October 3.

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A girl cries as community activists approach her outside her Monrovia home on Thursday, October 2, a day after her mother was taken to an Ebola ward.

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A health official uses a thermometer Monday, September 29, to screen a Ukrainian crew member on the deck of a cargo ship at the Apapa port in Lagos, Nigeria.

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Workers move a building into place as part of a new Ebola treatment center in Monrovia on September 28.

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Medical staff members at the Doctors Without Borders facility in Monrovia burn clothes belonging to Ebola patients on Saturday, September 27.

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Medics load an Ebola patient onto a plane at Sierra Leone's Freetown-Lungi International Airport on Monday, September 22.

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A few people are seen in Freetown during a three-day nationwide lockdown on Sunday, September 21. In an attempt to curb the spread of the Ebola virus, people in Sierra Leone were told to stay in their homes.

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Supplies wait to be loaded onto an aircraft at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport on Saturday, September 20. It was the largest single shipment of aid to the Ebola zone to date, and it was coordinated by the Clinton Global Initiative and other U.S. aid organizations.

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A child stops on a Monrovia street Friday, September 12, to look at a man who is suspected of suffering from Ebola.

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Health workers in Monrovia place a corpse into a body bag on Thursday, September 4.

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After an Ebola case was confirmed in Senegal, people load cars with household items as they prepare to cross into Guinea from the border town of Diaobe, Senegal, on Wednesday, September 3.

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Crowds cheer and celebrate in the streets Saturday, August 30, after Liberian authorities reopened the West Point slum in Monrovia. The military had been enforcing a quarantine on West Point, fearing a spread of the Ebola virus.

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A health worker wearing a protective suit conducts an Ebola prevention drill at the port in Monrovia on Friday, August 29.

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Volunteers working with the bodies of Ebola victims in Kenema, Sierra Leone, sterilize their uniforms on Sunday, August 24.

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A burial team from the Liberian Ministry of Health unloads bodies of Ebola victims onto a funeral pyre at a crematorium in Marshall, Liberia, on Friday, August 22.

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Dr. Kent Brantly leaves Emory University Hospital on Thursday, August 21, after being declared no longer infectious from the Ebola virus. Brantly was one of two American missionaries brought to Emory for treatment of the deadly virus.

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An Ebola Task Force soldier beats a local resident while enforcing a quarantine on the West Point slum on August 20.

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Local residents gather around a very sick Saah Exco, 10, in a back alley of the West Point slum on Tuesday, August 19. The boy was one of the patients that was pulled out of a holding center for suspected Ebola patients after the facility was overrun and closed by a mob on August 16. A local clinic then refused to treat Saah, according to residents, because of the danger of infection. Although he was never tested for Ebola, Saah's mother and brother died in the holding center.

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A burial team wearing protective clothing retrieves the body of a 60-year-old Ebola victim from his home near Monrovia on Sunday, August 17.

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Workers prepare the new Ebola treatment center on August 17.

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Liberian police depart after firing shots in the air while trying to protect an Ebola burial team in the West Point slum of Monrovia on August 16. A crowd of several hundred local residents reportedly drove away the burial team and their police escort. The mob then forced open an Ebola isolation ward and took patients out, saying the Ebola epidemic is a hoax.

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A crowd enters the grounds of an Ebola isolation center in the West Point slum on August 16. The mob was reportedly shouting, "No Ebola in West Point."

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A health worker disinfects a corpse after a man died in a classroom being used as an Ebola isolation ward Friday, August 15, in Monrovia.

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Health workers in Kenema screen people for the Ebola virus on Saturday, August 9, before they enter the Kenema Government Hospital.

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Aid worker Nancy Writebol, wearing a protective suit, gets wheeled on a gurney into Emory University Hospital in Atlanta on August 5. A medical plane flew Writebol from Liberia to the United States after she and her colleague Dr. Kent Brantly were infected with the Ebola virus in the West African country.

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Members of Doctors Without Borders adjust tents in the isolation area in Kailahun on July 20.

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Boots dry in the Ebola treatment center in Kailahun on July 20.

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Dr. Jose Rovira of the World Health Organization takes a swab from a suspected Ebola victim in Pendembu, Sierra Leone, on Friday, July 18.

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Red Cross volunteers disinfect each other with chlorine after removing the body of an Ebola victim from a house in Pendembu on July 18.

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A scientist separates blood cells from plasma cells to isolate any Ebola RNA and test for the virus Thursday, April 3, at the European Mobile Laboratory in Gueckedou, Guinea.

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Health specialists work Monday, March 31, at an isolation ward for patients at the facility in southern Guinea.

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Brantly didn't have all those tools at his disposal this summer in Liberia, where hospitals shut down after becoming "incubators for the disease," according to Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

He did, however, have his ardent faith and whatever strength that his body could muster.

Relying on both was his best, only hope of someday reuniting with his wife and two children, who had returned to the United States a few days before his diagnosis.

"I thought, 'I'm not going to be able to continue breathing this way,' and they had no way to breathe for me if I quit breathing," he said.

Yet he didn't stop. Brantly kept fighting Ebola and -- unlike many of those he'd treated -- he won.

The thing is, while Brantly would never have chosen to contract Ebola, he did choose to go to West Africa. His reasoning was simple: People there needed help and, feeling it was God's calling, he wanted to help.

So, in 2013, he began a two-year fellowship through the Christian relief organization Samaritan's Purse. Brantly started off practicing general medicine but, when Ebola began spreading, he took on the role of medical director for the group's Ebola Consolidated Case Management Center in Monrovia.

That was his job when he woke up the morning of July 23.

"I just felt a little off, I felt a little warm, a little under the weather," Brantly told NBC, adding he then discovered he had a temperature not too much above the 98.6 degree baseline.

His only relief was that his wife, Amber, and their children hadn't woken up next to him, that he didn't have to carry "an overwhelming mental burden" of worrying if they too had come down with the disease. For while Ebola can take days to incubate, it's only contagious when a sufferer is symptomatic -- something Brantly didn't have to worry about with his family.

Yet the family had plenty of reason to worry for Brantly after he tested positive for Ebola.

"I'd seen him treat these people who had already been diagnosed, and I knew how it ends," his wife Amber told NBC. "... I had the disadvantage of having the knowledge of the course of the disease. I was scared."

She wasn't the only one. According to his hometown newspaper, the Indianapolis Star, Kent Brantly himself told a fellow doctor at John Peter Smith Hospital that he was "terrified."

"I'm praying fervently that God will help me survive this disease," Brantly said in an email to Dr. David McRay, the newspaper reported.

Beats odds and survives

Somehow, he did.

According to WHO, more than half of those afflicted with Ebola in this current outbreak have died -- a function of how devastating the disease can be as well as a function of where it struck the hardest, a place without widespread high-quality health care options and cultural and social factors that may have contributed to its spread.

Yet Brantly made it through those first few trying weeks. On August 2, he was whisked back on a medical plane to the United States, walking into Atlanta's Emory University Hospital in a white, full-body protective suit.

His new home was Emory's special isolation unit, where his interactions with others were strictly restricted to prevent the virus from spreading. Amber visited him, for example, though she could only see him through a glass wall and talk to him via an intercom.

By August 21 -- two days after Nancy Writebol, an American missionary who had worked with Brantly who also came down with Ebola and got treatment at Emory -- it was a different story.

He hugged and shook hands with nurses and doctors who he, just a few days earlier, hadn't been able to touch. Dr. Bruce Ribner, the head of Emory's Infectious Disease Unit, declared that he posed "no public health threat" and could go free.

"Today is a miraculous day," Brantly said then. "I am thrilled to be alive, to be well and to be reunited with my family."

Still, he realizes the fight against Ebola is far, far from over. And it's still personal. Brantly said that he learned Tuesday morning that a doctor he'd worked with in Liberia -- another American, like him and Writebol -- had tested positive for the virus.

After hearing the news, Brantly told NBC, "I spent a good, long while in tearful prayer."